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The shock of witnessing high craft with an element of absurdity is extraordinarily endearing and pleasurable.
We crave the seriousness of mastery (slavish hours of discipline and excellence) to be thoroughly commingled with blustery foolishness. It recognizes the best of being human.
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When you look to the future, you hope and worry; you begin to plan, project, forecast, and fidget; you cease to be present and enliven potential concerns that determine your actual behavior.
When considering the future, you try to fight for a “future you” who doesn’t exist, but might.
Paradoxically, in clinging to fictitious dreams and concerns (attempting to manifest one and dodge the other), you are not your best in the present moment, which assures a distracted outcome. That is, you only achieve being absent now.
If you are your best self now, right now, and right now and now, your future self will be the compilation of all those present, best versions of you.
Please consider the future during a set aside time and decide who you want to be, but realize that version will only emerge from your behavior in the present.
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“Forgiving others isn’t for them, but a gift to ourselves,” or “your anger at me reveals your anger at yourself,” are shared insights that are a reversal of our initial reaction.
We take the image, flip it, and reflect it back to reveal a hidden dynamic.
The flaw is to assume insight is wisdom: we have just created a new image. We must remember that images and mirrors are flattened realities unable to contain the complexity of reality.
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There is an ouroboros of history: we create the very errors we attempt to solve with our knowledge of history.
Not only is history “written by the victors,” but in attempting to learn and apply our lessons we misdiagnose (fall prey to confirmation bias) allowing us to recreate the idiocy we attempt to avoid.
In an ultimate irony, we recreate the circular cliche “history repeats itself” by applying the incorrect past lessons to current problems.
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When you give too much, people become accustomed to it, building up a tolerance. You are a generous person, so they react less ecstatically to your kindness as they are less impressed.
While this is normal, the people-pleaser is addicted to the reaction and must always give more to get the same response until it looks like insanity: your excessive kindness is overbearing and self-destructive.
The addictive nature of the diminishing high leads to a vicious cycle.
From Nick Pollard
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The self that you recognize as your “true self” is when you are in optimal health.
When ill, depressed, or stressed, it is not the real you.
However, for most of our lives, we are not at an optimal state, much less peak mental and physical health.
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Perhaps the core of any wisdom tradition is a framework to be aware of yourself: meta-awareness judgment.
We often condemn others for not being self-aware (or not having the discipline to stop themself when they demand too much), but inevitably, we replicate the behaviors we recognize in others. As if, by seeing it, we cannot help but enact for ourselves, try it on for size.
The compulsion to indulge strengthens, and to break it is to displace it with an alternative. Which requires recognizing and then indulging in something new.
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Being bad is a value judgment; being wrong is making an error. (A recipe can be “bad” without being wrong, i.e. you can follow the recipe without a mistake and still make a lousy soup.)
To be wrong is to be incorrect (such as selecting the wrong answer), while a bad decision is intentionally harmful (to decide not to study for the test).
This distinction (and most language distinctions) matters because those who re-label a “bad” (moral) choice as a “mistake” (incorrect/wrong) will allow them to dodge responsibility.
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We often catastrophize a situation into being. There is no problem, just our feelings, which we elevate into a dramatic reaction.
There is an option to approach your perceived problem constructively, but intense emotion clouds and obscures.
This implies that hell is to be trapped in your feelings, unable to see beyond yourself, merely reacting with more emotion.
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By gaining more information, we will see patterns more completely, which will allow us to understand how complicated reality functions. More data is the path to truth.
However, most spiritual traditions teach us we find “truth” when we drop our labels and our opinions, our illusions.
The reliance on intelligence to perceive truth has a paradoxical quality: The more knowledge you add grants you a better understanding, which also adds a layer of bias (an extra opinion or delusion) that blocks you from the truth.
And yet, this additional knowledge allows you to, over time, recognize and subtract misleading positions, guiding you back to truth.
